by Daniel Hathaway
HAPPENING THIS WEEKEND:
Last call for Holiday Concerts.
On Friday and Saturday at 2:30 and 7:30, Cleveland Orchestra Holiday Concerts continue at Severance Center with Brett Mitchell on the podium and soprano Capathia Jenkins in the spotlight.
On Friday & Saturday at 7, Chagrin Falls Studio Orchestra presents Wassail concerts at Chagrin Valley Little theater, and on Friday at 7:30, Les Délice winds up its Noel, Noel series featuring soprano Amanda Powell at Disciples Church in Cleveland Heights.
On Saturday at high Noon, TubaChristmas Akron (pictured) packs the stage of E.J. Thomas Hall with gleaming tubas and euphoniums.
And on Sunday, Christmas Eve, through a strange convergence of dates and time zones, the annual Festival of Nine Lessons & Carols from King’s College, Cambridge will be broadcast live at 10am, the same hour that churches in the US’s Eastern Time Zone are marking the last Sunday in Advent. Read a reflection from the Dean of Chapel, download the printed program and listen live here.
Visit our Concert Listings for details.
RECORDINGS OF NOTE:
These recordings of particular interest to Northeast Ohioans are among the New York Times’ Best Classical Music Albums of 2023:
Missy Mazzoli’s Dark With Excessive Bright, with Peter Herresthal, violin and the Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra & Arctic Philharmonic; Tim Weiss, James Gaffigan, conductors. “Missy Mazzoli is a master of chiaroscuro. Her first full-length album of orchestral music opens with a bold statement of blinding light and warmly inviting darkness. Her compositions have a signature sound and a sense of movement, as in the enlarging circles of “Sinfonia (for Orbiting Spheres)” and the plunging explorations of These Worlds in Us.”
Tenor Lawrence Brownlee’s Rising. “Brownlee, Rossini tenor extraordinaire, stretches his vibrato-dense instrument to register subtle feelings aroused in him by songs of the African American experience. Captivating in his commitment, he doesn’t waste a note.”
Mary Lou Williams: Zodiac Suite. Aaron Diehl Trio and the Knights, Eric Jacobsen, conductor. “The Knights revel in textures flowing from her appreciation of Hindemith; a rhythm section locks into swing grooves. The pianist Aaron Diehl moves deftly between those worlds, and supports an art-song finale that features the soprano Mikaela Bennett.
Fauré: Nocturnes & Barcarolles. Marc-André Hamelin. “Fauré’s 13 nocturnes and 13 barcarolles — two and a half hours in all — are not the kind of dizzyingly virtuosic works that are the fire-fingered Marc-André Hamelin’s stock in trade. But his clarity and sensitivity confirm that this is music of tender poignancy and subtle experimentation.
WEEKEND ALMANAC:
Continuing our list of first or other notable performances on these dates in music history.
December 22 — by Jarrett Hoffman
Premieres on December 22 include Debussy’s Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun (Paris, 1894) and several works by Beethoven at a concert in Vienna in 1808. As Daniel Hathaway wrote in an almanac entry from 2020,
Over the course of four hours in an unheated hall, the audience heard the premieres of his Fifth and Sixth Symphonies, Fourth Piano Concerto, Choral Fantasy, mass movements, and an aria, performed by a hostile and under-rehearsed orchestra and a teen-aged replacement soprano, with Beethoven himself at the piano.
Then there’s the piece of music that won three Grammy Awards in 1958, that reached #1 on the Billboard Top 100 on December 22 that year, and that involves the varying of tape speeds to achieve striking alterations of pitch.
Listen to the voice of Ross Bagdasarian (using the stage name David Seville) in The Chipmunk Song (Christmas Don’t Be Late) here.
December 23:
In 1893, the first performance of Humperdinck’s “fairy tale opera” Hansel and Gretel, took place at the Hoftheater in Weimar.
In 1952, the debut of Shostakovich’s 24 Preludes and Fugues for pianoformed part one of a two-part recital presented by pianist Tatyana Nikolayeva in Leningrad.
And in 1989, The first pair of public performances of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony at the Philharmonie in West Berlin was given by an international orchestra conducted by Leonard Bernstein in celebration of the fall of the Berlin Wall. (Pictured above. The second performance was on Christmas Day at the Schauspielhaus in East Berlin.)
December 24:
In 1871, the curtain rose at the Khedival Theater in Cairo for the debut of Verdi’s Aïda, commemorating the opening of the Suez Canal.
And on Christmas Eve of 1951, Gian Carlo Menotti’s Amahl and the Night Visitors debuted live on the NBC-TV network, performed by the NBC Television Opera Theater.
December 25:
On Christmas Day of 1723, the E-flat version of Bach’s Magnificat with Christmas interpolations, was first performed in Leipzig, followed in 1734 by thee debut of the first cantata of Bach’s Christmas Oratorio, at Leipzig’s Thomaskirche.
On this side of the pond, Christmas Day, 1815 marked the first concert by the Handel and Haydn Society of Boston.
Early in the morning on December 25, 1870, Richard Wagner surprised his wife Cosima and their young son with his Siegfried Idyll, performed from the top of a staircase.
And on Christmas Day of 1931, New York’s Metropolitan Opera presented the first national broadcast of an entire opera. The title? Humperdinck’s Hansel and Gretel.
